Independent Institute Speech – Part 2

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Can I just
add, I agree completely with that. You see, the unions
are not the whole problem in education. It`s got lots of
other problems. The problem is the system is not short
of problems. [Laughter] Virginia is a government-run
school system, and the ethos of the government school
system pervades Virginia even though the school boards
there have a lot more power than they do elsewhere. The
national right to work people will say that. They`ve
talked to employers about unionization.

And in
heavily unionized states—well, for example, in Britain
where I come from—you`ve got the phenomenon of employees
who kind have become like pit ponies. They never see the
light of day. They don`t know what it is to be free. And
they`ll say things like, if we didn`t have unions how
would we set wages? So the government school system
itself is a pervasive problem, and would be a problem
regardless of the existence of the union. There are
other problems. The weakening of the union is not a
panacea, but it is a prerequisite.

There are a
number of writers like Ivan Illich and others who`ve
raised the question of whether compulsory education laws
are actually state-sponsored child labor. This lady
right here?

The unions
aren`t the problem. They`re blocking change, that`s the
problem. Politicians and the political process is the
problem.

Well, every
stakeholder in a big bureaucracy is going to block
change, it`s just a bureaucracy.

That`s the
point.

What I have
seen is that there has been a lot of power structure not
so much with the teachers` union, they have a lot of
power, but also the Superintendents` Association, the
School Board Associations. These folks have a lot of
power, because when you talk to the rank and file
teachers, oftentimes they don`t agree with what`s going
on at the upper end of the teachers` unions. And a lot
of the money that`s in the educational system, which is
over 55 percent of the state budget right now, does not
get into the classroom. So I think our biggest thing
that we can attack the public government schools with is
that so much of the dollar goes to the bureaucracy, the
overhead, and not the one-to-one teaching ratio. I think
that`s where we have to attack this. So the teachers`
union, the rank and file, is not that powerful. It`s the
superintendents.

I have a
friend that works for the California State Teachers`
Retirement System. People are retiring with millions of
dollars from teaching—from being a bean counter in the
district office—and that`s got to change. And I think if
those facts get out there, that will influence a lot of
people. Thank you.

Could I sort
of just slightly change one of the points that she was
making and raise a question for both panelists? If you
didn`t have compulsory funding of schools, what would
happen to the collective bargaining nature of the
union`s power? Any thought about that? In other words,
if people were not compelled to fund public schools,
what would happen to the nature of the union
participation?

Well,
anything that interjected freedom into the system, where
the teachers aren`t all treated the same, the union
would be destroyed.

This
gentleman right there.

Making the
assumption that you people have your finger on the pulse
of this thing, at least more than I do, can you gaze
into your crystal ball and tell me what the legal
climate of home-schooling might be? I mean they`re under
assault from the teacher trust, or the whole
institutional thing, but at the same time they seem to
serve as a safety valve also for kids that just can`t
fit in the one-size-fits-all education system. But will
they survive? And what is the future of home-schooling
from a legal perspective?

Well, my
impression is that home-schooling—there`s been battles
for it in almost every state on this question, and
essentially the home-schools have won. They have been
able to compel the authorities to recognize that there
are home-schools and it`s legitimate. And they`re doing
it for a bunch of reasons. The best reason is that
they`re organized. They`re highly organized and use the
Internet a lot. They`re a very well organized minority.
And the evidence is that more and more people are going
into it.

The one
thing you haven`t talked about is parent involvement.
And I`m a perfect example of that, having lived in San
Francisco and moved out because I thought the public
schools were so terrible, and I couldn`t afford private
schools. I went to Orinda, where the public schools are
excellent and the children have done well. That`s
because we`re very, very involved. So what do you think
about the parent involvement forcing the changes that
you want?

Well, parent
involvement is discouraged by our current system. I
agree with you that parent involvement is an important
ingredient, and if we involve parents in choosing
schools and matching children to programs, that can`t
help but create additional involvement. We definitely
need that.

I`ve worked
as a teacher, and I`ve worked in a juvenile hall system
for a while, and I come across some 16 year-old kids who
commit crimes and go to juvenile hall. We find out that
they have disruptive, dysfunctional families, etc. They
need counseling and all these other things. And yet I`ve
also met 16 year-old kids who are bored and troublesome
in high school, and they want to drop out, and they`d
like to join the military where they might be able to
come under the government wing and get all these
services also. But our present system does not allow
that. So what`s wrong with this picture and how can we
fix it?

Well, I
think we described that, it`s to give them some choice
in doing some of these things. I don`t think there`s any
reason to force one size—I mean one size doesn`t fit
all. You can`t expect to put children from across the
spectrum in one school, much less one classroom.

For
instance, these discipline problem children, they should
have special services in a school specialized to handle
that problem. They shouldn`t poison classrooms across
the system by being in there, and disrupting, and
occupying all of the teacher`s time. No one teacher is
talented enough to be just that right person across this
spectrum of children`s interests and needs—although a
few miracle workers are out there.

Thank you.
Have either of you taken on work at the ratio of dollars
spent for special education versus the rest of the
education population, and how that affects the outcome?

I haven`t
looked at that per se, but I know that the choiceless
system, like we have, greatly magnifies the perception
that there are special education problems. A system of
diverse schools that are specialized, where parents
would choose, would drastically reduce the number of
children labeled by their parents in some way—or labeled
by schools that thought to have to get some more money
from them.

I have some
data on that in Worm, and it`s expensive, and
it`s a major factor in the increase of costs—the decline
of productivity of the system.

I mentioned
the Oakland schools, originally. That`s a major problem.

What I
really need to know is if it`s having an effect upon the
outcome of the education of the rest of the children in
the school?

Mainstreaming is a disaster.

Because the
ratio has gotten so far out of kilter.

Well, we
know that the results the rest of the children are
producing are not great. So something`s doing it. So
that`s not a bad candidate.

Some of the
work that I do with a group of people is working with
these special students. And the parents choose in our
system to come to our services through the public
schools. So my question is, are you familiar with, or do
you know of any agencies out there, that are currently
working with the public schools. Are there any other
organizations out there that you`re familiar with, with
special needs kids, that parents have financial ability
to choose in a public school?

Peter, I`m
striking out on this one.

I think
there`s some provision in No Child Left behind for that,
isn`t there?

Yes. There`s
a supplemental service provider list that, but none of
them are pretty much in the public schools. The service
providers on that list have gone through, in the State
of California, a series of exam questions, and then
you`re allowed to come into the system and you`re given
a certain amount of money. It runs between $400 and
$1,200 per student, if the school allows you in. Most
schools—Sylvan, Kaplan, other institutions, individuals
who run counseling centers—these are some of them that
are on the supplemental service provider list for
California.

And that`s
growing.

Oh, it`s
huge. It`s growing.

I remember
an article a few years ago by

Janet Beales, and she`s in an organization around
here—I can`t remember which one it is.

She was with
Reason for a while. She`s independent now.

She wrote an
article about all of the children sent by choice by the
public school officials to private schools that
specialized in particular special needs.

And the
school system paid for it?

The school
system paid for it.

Where was
this?

It was a
couple of years ago, in a newspaper, Wall Street
Journal.

No pervasive
programs that are currently taking some foothold for
parent choice?

Not that I
know of. Try to get a hold of her though. She sounds
like she really knows that area.

Well, I run
a private school myself, and we have a teacher at our
school who is French, and so I have a question for Peter
in particular, namely, that the French Left is very
different from the American Left, in the sense that they
want higher standards. They say that they don`t want
poor people to be exploited by the rich because the poor
people are ignorant. Why do we see so much demand for
lower standards on the part of the American Left? And is
there any chance of reversing that so they`re going for
higher standards for the poorest so that the poor don`t
get exploited? And that competition might be a part of
that?

How long do
we have? [Laughter]

The short
answer to that is we need to get the standards-setting
out of the political process. That shouldn`t be a
political issue.

Well, the
question you`re raising about American Left is an
extremely interesting one, but it`s not easy to answer.
It depends what you think their motives are. And the
American Left is not rooted in the working class. It`s
an elite left. Whereas I would say the French, and to
some extent, the British Left traditionally came out of
the labor movement, and so on, and actually had the
interests of the working class at heart and cared about
the working class. It`s not clear that that`s the case
in the American Left. It`s an elite left.

That`s
equally true in Britain, by the way, though. The
education reforms that the socialist put through during
the war in the coalition government were highly
competitive, and highly examination-driven, and
IQ-driven, and they developed a highly efficient system
of socialism. But it was based on selectivity and around
competition.

Yeah, also
the position of the public school system on what was a
common school system—it was a combination of common
schools and other schools in the U.S.—was imposed by
wealthier people on poor immigrants and so forth. Dick,
did you have a question?

Yes, sir,
thank you very much. How would you modify the current
taxation system and the distribution of the taxation to
the different schools, private as well as religious and
public?

Well, I
haven`t thought about that as much. Currently what we
need to do is voucherize the existing funding or tax-creditize
it if you wish. But at some point, it would help to
unify the funding and not have it be some mixture of
federal, state, and local. Frankly, I think we need to
get away from income taxes. So it probably ought to be
some kind of a sales tax. And property taxes as well,
get away from those.

I just want
to comment on the special eds. This Saturday, Hayward
Unified is having a board meeting, and they`re going to
vote potentially to abandon class size reduction. And
they have some 340 K-3 classes. That would increase
class size from 20 to 32 in a difficult district, with a
lot of multiethnic problems in terms of teaching reading
and what have you.

And in this
district there`s an encroachment over $2 million of the
special ed into the regular fund. Other districts I`m
told in Berkeley had nine million. In Oakland it`s even
larger. But it seems to be almost an entitlement,
writing IEPs, learning disabilities. We have lots of
autistics, and they`re very expensive, and Hayward`s
doing a good job attracting more autistics—I don`t know
where they`re coming from—but there`s no limit to this.
The district seems to be afraid of the lawsuits. And so,
imagine giving up class size reduction in 144 classes
for little first-graders, kindergartners, because of
this thing is out of control that the district is not
willing to take on. So it`s a real crisis with regard to
special ed.

The lady
right there.

Yeah, a
couple of questions. And just in terms of historical
perspective, it seems to me that the compulsory
attendance laws were put in place because of demands of
the labor market. So because the children were working
in factories, and so to open the jobs for adult males,
that was one of the things—and it seems to me that
looking outside the box in a way, that if you were to
change that for the demands of our economy today—that
would be one question I would have for you.

And the
other question is in terms of your political
constituencies, it seems that you get interested in
education when you have children, and you`re interested
until they`re done, and then you`re not interested
anymore. And so you have a fluctuating base, and yet,
the institution remains and the teachers remain, and the
bureaucrats remain. So they`re able to have a much more
stable sort of lobbying effort.

And then the
other question is that my mother taught in Louisiana for
38 years, and they didn`t have unions. And when she was
in school, you couldn`t even chew gum, and they would
tell you who to marry, because teachers had to uphold
this certain calling—it was not just a job. But it seems
to me that somehow, if you don`t have collective
bargaining, what do the teachers do in their own
economic interests, which would seem to be in line with
this Institute`s mandate? I have cousins who teach in
private schools. They have no retirement, they get lower
wages. What do you put in place of that, because that`s
their economic self-interest is at stake. They`re not
going to go for that. And if you do want to enact this
kind of change, you have to offer something else. So
those are my three areas.

Well,
teachers would certainly see improved working
conditions. Whether they would see improved salaries
would depend on how many former teachers would come back
into the system after teaching became a profession
again, as opposed to more of a blue collar union
occupation that it is now. So I don`t see any problem in
setting wages for true professionals that work with
clients that choose them, and that specialize in areas
according to wage differentials, and sell themselves as
productive team player teachers that somebody would want
to hire.

And I know
that principals want to be involved in hiring teachers,
and that`s the way it needs to happen, not school
cartels called districts hiring teachers. The teachers
need to be in a labor market where they can choose the
school that they work in, not the district that they
work in, and where they can shop themselves directly
among competing schools, public or private.

I agree that
it`s true that most people get into education when they
have children, but one of the points I make in my book
is that you have to look at the cost dimension. In other
words, people should be interested in education because
they`re taxpayers. That`s what`s really impacting most
people. I mean education is not a trivial cost in this
country, and it really does drive state and local
spending, and anybody who`s concerned about taxes should
look to that.

Your point
about the interest of teachers— of course, wages do get
set in the private sector through a variety of ways. And
for teachers, they should have these options, too. As I
say, in Texas, there is one organization, which is a
profit-making entity, that bargains on behalf of
teachers. It`s basically like having an agent, a
literary agent or something. And another suggestion that
I examine in this book is that we could move to a
European model where you have competing unions, where
you don`t have exclusive camps. You have several
different unions.

More
generally, though, I think the point you`re making about
the interest of the teachers in the current system is a
very good one. One of the lessons of the privatization
movement in Britain, when they did substantially
privatize the nationalized sect, which was very, very
large, is that however much it may distress you, you
basically have to bribe the people in the system to give
up their current position. And they did it in the case
of privatization of the Water Board, and the
electricity, and so on, by giving the workers shares.
And that worked very well. It brought the workers over
the objection to it. And we have to find some similar
equivalent to buy out the entrenched interests in the
education system.

We don`t
want to judge a choice-based system on the basis of the
private sector, the depravity of the private sector that
we have now, because the private schools are now in a
situation where it`s a miracle that there are any
private schools. By the way, I appreciate you in the
back that you`ve been able to perform this miracle. But
try to think of another part of our economy where
somebody can sell something for thousands of dollars
that someone else is giving away. Pretty tough.

On the
issue, by the way, of historical background of
compulsory education, if you go back and look at the
writings of the people who are proponents of it, you`ll
find that it was very xenophobic, very racist, very
ethnocentric. And you combine that with the fact that a
lot of wanted to essentially reduce the labor market.
They want to eliminate young people being in the labor
market, which is part of what continued in other ways,
too. That`s also how Apartheid started, too. How about
this gentleman right here.

Thanks. I
was a teacher for 20 years, and the prevailing outlook
of my colleagues was, all we ask is less work to do and
higher pay when we don`t get it done. It was a
disgusting period of time. I was in the classroom for 20
years. In the district where I live, the teacher union
orchestrated the school board election in 1990, and won
an award from CTA for doing so. CTA gives the Joyce
Fadem (award for excellence in manipulation of school
board elections. [Laughter]

As far as
democratization in the Oakland City schools is
concerned, ebonics is the model of democratization in
the Oakland City schools. Now I know I need to ask a
question. [Laughter]

Thank you
for that comment. We appreciate that.

There are
some who say that dumbing-down of American education is
rather deliberate. That there are forces from Lou
Gerstner of IBM, to Mark Tucker of the Carnegie
Foundation, to Hilary Clinton, who have in view an
American workforce that is pliant, that is a blank slate
that can be pretty much manipulated into whatever
position is needed. Have you had any experience, any
dealings with that movement? Can you talk about that for
a moment?

This sounds
like the kind of thing that would interest David.
[Laughter] Well, I haven`t, but I know that it`s
certainly easier to sustain a system like the one we
have when there isn`t any understanding of economics,
and certainly we`ve achieved that.

If the
purpose of education is that every individual matures
and is able to think for him or herself, and understand
the world and function successfully, the model that
you`re mentioning, which is the mainstream model, is the
opposite. It`s to dumb-down the quality. It`s to make
people think alike. It`s to make people subservient and
basically submissive to the system. I`m not sure if you
know about the story of the "Pledge of Allegiance," but
one of the major advocates of compulsory education was a
guy named Francis Bellamy, who wrote the "Pledge of
Allegiance." And he was a Christian Socialist, and he
believed very strongly that you had to mold the
citizenry, the young people, into being essentially
loyal subjects of a national government. And there`s a
whole story about the practice of reciting the "Pledge
of Allegiance," actually raising your arm up, and
there`s a whole thing he wrote about this, which he got
adopted throughout the country. And it`s part of this
model that education is to essentially create sort of
robot-type figures that will be subservient rather than
create individual, independent, self-acting people.

This is kind
of a general question, maybe some of the audience could
answer it. In the Alameda County school system, my
grandson has seen the movie Malcolm X three
times, and he`s getting kind of bored with it.
[Laughter] Does anyone have any idea of what the film
budget is in Alameda County among the various school
districts?

Our
researcher has left.

Well, it
sounds like they`re pretty efficient to have one film
and they just keep showing it. [Laughter] I guess
they`re not spending a lot of money on films and they
could show three versions that are like Malcolm X,
but different, so they`d have to buy three films.

One more
question.

Regarding
the need of unions to protect the teachers` paychecks
and so forth—I live out in Lafayette in what is reputed
to be a pretty good school district, and it probably is.
And some of the best teachers have gotten together and
formed a private academy after school, during which time
they go back and repeat the day`s lessons. And we send
our kids there at roughly $25 per student per hour to
get the lesson they didn`t get in school.

Now why they
didn`t get it in school, I don`t know, but in order for
them to be able to graduate at the top of their class,
pass their SATs, and get into college, we add this on
top of whatever the hell we`re paying in Lafayette for
property taxes, which I don`t even want to talk about.
So, yes, the unions do defend some of the teachers, the
ones we probably would be better off without.

I want to
thank our speakers, Peter Brimelow and John Merrifield.
[Applause] I want to thank you for joining with us. For
those of you who have not picked up copies of their
books, I hope you will do so. They`re available
upstairs. They`d be happy to autograph copies. And we
hope to see you at our next Independent Policy Forum.
Thank you. Good night.